According to this article, there are only three employees at Dr. Pepper who know the recipe. How?
They must have dozens or more employees making the stuff. Someone has to purchase raw materials… If I signed 23 invoices for various flavors and sugars, I think I’d get it figured out… Sure maybe not the exact amounts of each, but at least the ingredients. Someone must measure each of the ingredients also.
And while I’m on the subject, why is it not on the can? I know that ‘natural flavors’ pretty much answers that, but I’m surprised they can print this. Perhaps someone is allergic to ingredient #17 even in small doses? How would you know not to drink it? What’s the threshold or amount of an ingredient before they have to list it on the package?
I think its like the six blind men and the elephant. There are lots of people who know part of the recipe, but they have no idea what the rest is. And I’m sure this applies to other products as well. There’s a huge difference between printing a list of ingredients and publicizing the recipe.
What I’ve always wondered is why can’t they take it into a lab in this day and age and figure out the chemical breakdown. Plus all the ingredients are listed as required by law anyway.
“Contents” or “Ingredients” and “recipe” are not actually the same thing.
But this “secret recipe” thing is probably a marketing ploy. It may be true to say that there are only three people with access to a “canonical” document kept by the manufacturer which lists all the ingredients and how to combine them to make the product, but probably there are a large number of other people who could make a pretty informed guess about what the document says. And I doubt that this bothers the manufacturer very much. Even if you knew how to replicate the stuff, you couldn’t sell what you made under the “Dr Pepper” brand, so the information wouldn’t be much use to you.
The author William Poundstone has written a number of books where he gives a sample of a secret food to an analytical lab, and with much effort, and some guessing, he deduces the recipe.
The conclusions are a bit surprising, when I read his recipe for Oysters Rockefeller, it was so unlike everyone else’s guess, I couldn’t help but feel he had oversimplified it. And cola recipes are so subtle in their flavors, you can’t help but wonder how they ever get it right.
You could put a human in a mass spectrometer, or else figure out all the ingredients some way; having that knowledge doesn’t mean you can make humans.
And, as has been said already, the most important ingredient actually is the brand name. I’m fairly sure a lot of people wouldn’t recognise Pepsi as Pepsi if it was served in a Coca Cola-bottle.
I can make humans. I’ve even done so successfully (she’ll be waking up here soon)! And I don’t even have a mass spectrometer. Needed an assistant, though.
Anyway, back to the OP: Obviously, there can be very close guesses, as evidenced by off-brand Dr. Pepper (Dr. K at Kroger, for instance), which tastes awfully close to the real deal. But I’m sure the exact quantities and such are a guarded secret even if there’s no real reason for it to be a secret.
My understanding is that Cotts (a Canadian company) are the major manufacturers of ‘own label’ soft drinks.
Also, a long time ago my father worked for a soft drinks manufacturer that had the Pepsi franchise. When I mentioned the ‘secret’ stuff, he laughed and said of course they knew what was in it. Actually I worked in the factory syrup room one vac, and mixed the stuff. It came in from Ireland or Amsterdam in 5 gallon (?) blue barrels - and was a sludge that needed diluting by thousands with sugar and water.
The whole image of a company keeping a secret recipe or formula under lock and key is part of brand building. It’s part of the company image. Coca Cola is one of those brands that has that going for it, because they’ve done a good job of making it known, and seems like Dr Pepper is doing the same.
So, while there is little value from a recipe standpoint, the real value is in the image of the brand.
I can see reverse-engineering the recipes of things that are mixtures, like cola drinks, but could you deduce the recipe of something that was baked? That involves chemical changes.
This is a lot like the Dr. Pepper situation. You had access to one half of the recipe and your spouse had access to the other. Neither of you had the whole recipe.
You could determine the final chemical composition of a baked or cooked item, but only a knowledge of probable ingredients and their chemical reactions could get you back to whatever was mixed in the first place.
Using UV, IR, HPLC, GC and/or Mass Spec analysis could probably find all the ingredients in a sample of Dr Pepper pretty easily (provided a comparison database to compare spectra to known ingredients*) and even tell you the relative amounts in the sample, allowing you to re-create Dr Pepper pretty accurately. What could be an issue is the mixing process; whether adding ingredients in a certain order could somehow affect the taste, but that is more likely to be like the baking scenario, where a bit of food chemistry knowledge could help you solve that.
*Ignore what you see on CSI - you cannot put anything at all into a given instrument and get an ID without first having some reasonable guess as to what you’re going to find, configuring the instrument as a function of that guess, and then comparing the result to a known standard/library. It also cannot be done in 1.3 minutes or less.
I remember reading somewhere (might’ve been one of Poundstone’s books) that Coke knows what Pepsi’s “secret” formula is and vice versa.
There’s only so many different ways to make cola flavored soda, and given the basic ingredients/process and some time to experiment you could figure it out pretty easily. It’s not rocket science. There’s tons of generic/off brand cola sodas out there, and some of them come pretty close to “the real thing”.
I would imagine Dr. Pepper is pretty much the same thing. It’s not that it’s impossible to figure out. If you worked for a competitor of Dr. Pepper, I’m sure you’d be able to whip up a batch in your own basement given a little time and experimentation. Now, if Dr. Pepper took you to court for using the same recipe, they’d be able to prove it fairly easily. So, you make a small change to it, maybe use a little more or less cherry flavor, slightly more carbonation, whatever. You name it “Dr. Pooper”, and sell it for half the price as a generic.
The bit about the secret formulas being “locked in bank vaults” and “known only to a handful of people” is pure BS. In his Big Secrets books, William Poundstone often mentions having samples of food analyzed by food chemists. Why is there even an industry for food chemists? The big food companies all have dozens working for them. They know exactly whats in their competitors food/drinks and how its made.
But they’d be fools to do so, because proving you used the same recipe would mean revealing their own recipe to the court, which would lose them the mystique of having a “secret recipe”.
When you get a generic pop that tastes a little different from the name brand, the most likely explanation is just that someone likes it a little better that way.
You could easily test as to if a product is indistinguishable from the “real thing” both from double blind taste testing as well as chemical analysis of the final product without disclosing the steps to create it.
OK, even if you can prove that the end product is identical, what can Dr Pepper do about it? It’s not a patent infringement, because to get a patent, you have to describe the thing you’re patenting in full detail. Maybe if the recipe were leaked by a Dr Pepper employee, and they could prove who it was, they could go after that employee for breach of contract, but that wouldn’t apply to someone else who had reverse-engineered it (since the reverse-engineer never signed any contract with Dr Pepper).
I suppose it’s like the story of the German soldier who knew no English, except, “has no nose.”
In the Staff Report,
one part says Dr Pepper lists polyethylene glycol on its Canadian labels. Mrs. Nott had a colonoscopy last week, so I know that polyethylene glycol is a laxative, in sufficient doses. Maybe that’s the source of the “contains prunes” rumor.
Randy Newman wrote the “I’m a Pepper, You’re a Pepper” jingle. He declined to sing it in the ads, so he didn’t get a wee residual payment every time the ad ran somewhere in the world. There’s a lesson in that, I guess.
If you mean the label on the bottle, though, that will typically just say “natural and artificial flavors”. The Big Secret presumably is not the carbonated water or the high-fructose corn syrup or even the caramel coloring, but rather exactly which “natural and artificial flavors” we’re talking about.
